Police on Wednesday arrested a man who allegedly duped elderly people in the Narendrapur-Sonarpur area on the pretext of helping them withdraw cash from ATMs.

The police said they had seized six ATM cards of different banks, which they suspect could have been stolen from other elderly victims, from Jagannath Gharami, the accused.

“An old man raised the alarm inside an ATM kiosk in the Narendrapur area on Wednesday when the accused tried to exchange his card with another after pretending to help him withdraw money. People outside the kiosk caught the accused. One of our patrol vehicles was not far from the spot and rushed there,” said an officer of Sonarpur police station.

The police said Gharami, a resident of Sonarpur, turned out to be the same person they were looking for in connection with another ATM fraud in the same area, which was reported on July 4.

An elderly person named Arun Kumar Das had reported that a man had first tried to “help” him withdraw money from an ATM and then exchanged his debit card with another card. Money had been fraudulently withdrawn from his account by the time Das realised his card had been replaced.

Both incidents bore an uncanny resemblance with the ATM fraud that was recently reported from Golf Green.

Sanghamitra Ghosh, a 74-year-old resident of Golf Green, had gone to the ATM of a nationalised bank on Uday Shankar Sarani on Saturday, with her son Bodhisatwa’s debit card of a private bank, when she was duped.

The elderly woman had met a man in the queue outside the ATM kiosk who allowed her to withdraw money before him.

However, the man allegedly entered the kiosk after her and apparently confused her by saying that double the amount she had typed had been debited from her account. He told her that she needed to take out a mini statement to check the transaction.

The man allegedly spied on her PIN when she took out the mini statement before replacing her ATM card with another card. Even before the woman reached her home, Rs 90,000 had been withdrawn from the account.

A senior officer of Sonarpur police station said they had shared details of the arrested person with Golf Green police to find out whether the same man had duped Ghosh.

“The accused has admitted that he had been operating in Rajpur, Narendrapur, Sonarpur and pockets of Calcutta. We are trying to get more details of the cases in which he has been involved,” said the officer.